Weizmann Institute

Tag archives for Weizmann Institute

Happy International Women’s Day. In the midst of today’s hand wringing about women in science, here’s some good news: The Weizmann Institute has just been awarded a prize by the City of Barcelona for its efforts to promote women in science. Above: Barcelona Civil Rights councilor Francina Vila i Valls presents the award to the…

New research at the Institute may offer a sliver of hope for treating “triple-negative” breast cancer. “Triple-negative” refers to the fact that the breast cancer cells are missing the three different receptors targeted by the currently available drugs, for instance Herceptin and steroid hormone blockers. This type of cancer also tends to be fairly aggressive,…

We have been told what it’s like to be a bat or a bird; now Prof. Ehud Ahissar and Dr. Avi Saig are getting people to experience what it’s like to be a rat. Specifically, they want the participants in their studies to learn what it’s like to locate things in the dark by twitching…

We were just getting used to the idea of our digestive tract as an ecosystem. There are 10 times as many bacteria in our gut as there are cells in our bodies, and the ecological balance between the different types might affect everything from our tendency to gain weight to our general health and susceptibility…

Not many Israelis make it all the way to the South Pole. (In fact, very few people go there, at all. Not only is it really, really cold, it is extremely difficult and expensive to transport people, gear and necessities to this remote and inhospitable corner of the earth.) So when we learned that Dr.…

A recent study by Prof. Ernesto Joselevich and his team, published in Science, features perfectly aligned horizontal arrays of thin, millimeter-long nanowires. We spoke with Joselevich recently to find out why he and others in the field are excited by this advance: WSW: Your lab has produced a fair amount of innovative research in recent…

Two recent papers to come out of the Weizmann Institute have possible medical applications — one in preventing pregnancy, the other in preventing the deadly effects of nerve gas. The first might give pause to those among us who are “believers” in antioxidants. It seems that those “nasty” molecules they eliminate — reactive oxygen species…

Did Israeli singer-songwriter Arik Einstein know something that scientists didn’t when he released the song “When You Cry You’re Not So Pretty” back in 1969? Prof. Noam Sobel and his team of the Weizmann Institute of Science have now shown that merely sniffing a woman’s tears – even when the crying woman is not present…

We are still frustrated in our efforts to get our new website up and running, so here’s something dated to contemplate. Going through the old articles that are in the process of being transferred over, here’s one that popped up from the second issue of Interface magazine (1992): Library without Walls. The article extols the…

Thousands came to the Weizmann Institute yesterday evening for Researchers’ Night activities. Researcher’s Night is sponsored by the EU, and it takes place all over Israel and across Europe. In addition to lab tours and showings of 3-D films of molecular structures, the Clore Garden Science — an outdoor science museum on the Weizmann campus…